There seems to be a mini-revival of media interest in Zimbabwe, including in the U.S. where the country’s crisis rarely gets much attention. Last night PBS Frontline ran “Zimbabwe: Shadows and Lies”, a well done documentary exposing the growing tyranny and propaganda of the ruling regime. Journalist Alexis Bloom (repeating stunts previously done by BBC reporters since the government banned foreign media a few years ago) snuck into the country pretending to be a tourist and shot in secret. The program does a nice job of summarizing the recent history and contains some great recent footage of Robert Mugabe, who comes off as downright creepy and increasingly paranoid. If you missed it, there’s lots of information and links on the Frontline website, the video will be available for download on July 5.The June 26 New Yorker ran “Big Man” by Joshua Hammer, who asks “Is the Mugabe era near its end?” Hammer also entered Zimbabwe posing as a tourist and documents the meltdown, but takes it a step further and interviews the leading opposition characters, asking how and when they plan to bring about political change. Hammer--I think rightly--concludes that Morgan Tsvangirai has made some mistakes, but “remains the most promising of the opposition figures.”Hammer’s most amusing interaction however is with Jonathan Moyo, the former academic who became Mugabe’s propaganda chief and is now trying to recast himself as a new opposition leader. Moyo (who is still facing embezzlement charges in Kenya and South Africa after allegedly defrauding the Ford Foundation) shows no regret for playing Mugabe’s Goebbels and leading the draconian crackdown on journalists and his former university colleagues. He even defends his acceptance of a free seized farm since,
“The record will show that the farm I got, I’m struggling with…I got derelict land…that did not have a single building on it.”
In other words, sure, Mugabe gave me someone else’s farm in exchange for doing his evil bidding, but I didn’t get one of the really good ones!Lastly, Harvard’s Robert Rotberg, in a
Financial Times oped on June 21 (subscription required), eloquently lays out the grim conditions in the country and calls for new action to spark a ‘rose revolution’. Let’s hope that all this new attention is a harbinger of real change.
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